Desperately Doodling Debbie
January 24, 2010
Wouldn’t you know, the minute I hurl myself into the blogosphere of modern communications, I can’t think of a thing to say. For the past three years, I’ve been muttering to myself such ponderously deep thoughts as, “Now, there’s an idea for a doozy of a doodle!” and “If only I had the doodle again, I could really expound the toenails off this situation.” But ever since my cozily convenient little blog has been awaiting greatness to pour forth into it, my overriding thought has been, “Duh, huh, wuh, blup!” This means my mind has gone to blubber like the rest of me.
Never fear, dear readers! Rest assured that this fully modernized woman can fill up a page, no matter the state of her mind. Here are a few thoughts that have been bouncing up and down on the brain blubber over the past few weeks:
Since I am officially older than I should be according to my calculations, I’ve taken to cramming my soul with all kinds of activities and intellectual pursuits that somehow passed me by during the fertile years of child raising. Some of these endeavors, I’m enjoying to the full extent of the law, while others leave me wishing there were some kind of law to save me from myself.
Take learning to play the piano. After 51 years of musical ignorance, I decided it was time to get educated. So Carly, my 16 year old daughter volunteered (sort of) to teach me. I have been taking lessons from her for approximately 14 months and I am still in the Level One book. I really, really need to speed up, because she’ll be graduated in another year, and there’s no way I’m paying somebody to torture me this much. I am so not good at this, but since I forced my daughters to stick with lessons until they liked it, or at least could play whether they wanted to or not, I feel obligated to continue. Plus I do want to be able to play a jazzed up version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” someday for my grandchildren. I need to be a good example to my progeny who will certainly all be prodigies.
I am also reading through the greatest 100 novels ever written, as judged by a bunch of English professors. This is right up my literature-loving alley, but I tell you folks, I think I read most of the pleasurably great ones in high school. Most of the ones I’ve read in the last couple of years could be classified, for me at least, as torturously great. Still, every now and then I come across one I really like, so that makes up for the others, which I try to like anyway, just because.
Then there’s math. For years I’ve been completely content to live my life virtually math free. I know enough to balance the checkbook and fork over money to my daughters every 9 1/2 minutes or so. That has kept me going all this time. But I have a very mathy friend who seems to think the whole world spins on math principles, so I bought a book that is supposed to make sense of math to “even English major types.” So far, I’m still not getting it. I read a page the other night about “quadrature of the lune,” which has something to do with triangles and arcs and circles and areas.
After reading it, I said to my mathematically challenged self, “Why should I care about this?” And guess what happened! I got this picture in my head of God at the top of a triangle, reaching down to me and then I reached out to someone else, which somehow helped that person reach back up to God. A living triangle of faith! That was a rather exciting moment for me. Generally, I haven’t related to God in a mathy way at all. I’m more of a wordy communicator, in case you haven’t noticed. So this was a totally new kind of revelation to me.
We need to be about making holy triangles in the world, whether that means doing what we can to help the people of Haiti recover from the earthquake devastation, or giving a hand to a neighbor in need, or saying a kind word to a tired sales clerk, or visiting nursing home residents. Every day we have opportunities to share God’s love and compassion with others, and every time we do, we make right angles between God and us and them. The hypotenuse is up to them to draw in order to complete the triangle.
I’m not sure exactly what the lunes have to do with anything, other than this may sound a bit loony to some of you. But I don’t care. Any word from God is good to me, even when it involves math.
So let’s get triangular and make a difference in our world!